It's taken a while to get the tech sector behind the notion of electronic medical records, but now it looks like the big guns are starting to line up in support of the notion. Datamation has the story.

The race to streamline online access to medical records turned into a stampede this week as leading high-tech vendors trumpeted new initiatives at the Health Information and Management Systems Society" (HIMSS) trade show in Atlanta.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Dell, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) IBM and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are all at the conference to tout new and pending deals designed to help consumers, doctors and hospital move to more easily accessible, but also secure, medical histories and information online.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) debuted a new service called Initiate Exchange, while also announcing that it's completed its acquisition of Initiate Systems.

Leveraging a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, Initiate Exchange is designed to help physicians issue orders, access test results and share registration information right from their electronic medical records (EMR) or practice management system. IBM said the SaaS approach makes it easier to add physicians to the system rather than requiring hospitals to develop new computing infrastructure or adding to their existing systems.